The Nobel Prize in Literature 1913 was awarded to Rabindranath Tagore "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West."

He won the Nobel Prize immediately after the publication of his work Gitanjali in London. In these songs, he uses modernized images from classical Indian love poetry to symbolize his yearning to merge with the creator. Both, publication of Gitanjali in 1912 and Nobel Prize in 1913 established Tagore's literary reputation worldwide. Ever since then Gitanjali is considered as the most widely read Indian poetry collection in the world.